The Mothers(19)



“I . . . I came in here last night and . . .” Elise looked dazed as Flora helped pull her to her feet.

“Girl, it’s morning already,” Agnes said. “You better get on home to your child.”

“My child?”

“Yes, honey. What you doin’ sleepin’ in here all night?”

“Robert probably worried sick,” Hattie said. “Get on home, then. Go on.”

At the time, we’d laughed as we watched Elise head through the morning fog to her car. Oh, wait till we told the ladies at bingo about this. Elise Turner, asleep in the church like an ordinary bum. They would have a field day with that one. She had always seemed a little strange to us anyway—dreamy, like her mind was a balloon on a long string and she forgot to reel it in sometimes.

For years, we’ve fixated on that final conversation. Elise had hesitated before going out to her car, a pause that varies in length throughout our memories; Betty says it was a long moment, Flora, a brief hitch. Should we have known Elise would drive off and shoot herself? Was there any way of knowing? No, nobody could’ve predicted it, not if Robert hadn’t even known. Elise Turner was beautiful. She had a child and a husband with a good government job. She had gone from cleaning white folks’ toilets to styling hair at the salon on base. A pretty black woman living as fine as any white woman. What did she have to complain about?



THAT SUMMER, Nadia Turner haunted us.

She looked so much like her mother that folks around Upper Room started to feel like they’d seen Elise again. As if her restless spirit—and no one doubted it was restless—was roaming the place where it had last been seen. The girl, who haunted the church halls with her beauty and her sullenness, barely noticed the stares, until one evening, when Second John offered her a ride home from work in the church van. He pulled onto the street, and for a second, their eyes met in the rearview mirror.

“You look so much like your mama,” he said. “Gives me chills to look at you.”

He glanced away, bashful almost, like he’d said the wrong thing. At dinner that night, she mentioned his comment to her father and he glanced up, as if he’d needed to remind himself of what her face looked like.

“You do,” he finally said, cutting his meat, his jaw set the way it always did whenever she tried to bring up her mother. Maybe that was why he always ran off to Upper Room, why he couldn’t stand to be around her. Maybe he hated looking at her because she only reminded him of all that he’d lost.

The night before her mother died, Nadia had caught her staring out the kitchen window, arms deep in soap suds, so gone in her own mind that she hadn’t noticed the sink almost overflowing. She’d laughed a little when Nadia shut off the water.

“Look at me,” she’d said. “Off daydreaming again.”

What had she been thinking about in that moment? Weren’t your final hours supposed to be dramatic and meaningful? Shouldn’t their last conversation have been emotional, even if it hadn’t registered to her at the time? But there was nothing special about that last moment. She had laughed too and brushed past her mother to the refrigerator. The next morning, she’d woken to find her father sitting on the edge of her bed, his face in his hands, so quiet she hadn’t even felt him sit on her mattress, weightless in his grief.

She still searched for clues, for strange things her mother had done or said, for signs that she should’ve noticed. At least then, her mother’s death would make sense. But she couldn’t think of any hints that her mother had wanted to die. Maybe she’d never really known her mother at all. And if you couldn’t know the person whose body was your first home, then who could you ever know?

She was lonely. How could she be anything else? Each morning, her father dropped her off at Upper Room, and each afternoon, she sat on the church steps, waiting for him to pick her up. After work, she passed the hours in bed, watching old episodes of Law & Order, waiting for the next morning when she would awake and start her routine all over again. Sometimes she thought she could pass time like this, one day falling into another until autumn. The hot winds would arrive and she would blow out with them, on to a new school in a new state where she would start a new life. Other times, she felt so miserable, she thought about calling her old friends. But what would she say to them? She’d had a mother and now she didn’t, and she’d been pregnant but now she wasn’t. She’d thought with time the distance between her and her friends would narrow, but that gap had only widened and she couldn’t find the energy to pretend otherwise. So she remained alone, working silently in the first lady’s office all morning, then shuffling outside at noon to eat lunch on the church steps. One afternoon, she was picking at her peanut butter sandwich when she noticed Aubrey Evans heading toward her. The girl smiled, clutching a sky blue lunch bag that matched her sundress. Nadia should have known she couldn’t just bring a brown bag like everyone else.

“Can I sit here?” she asked.

Nadia shrugged. She didn’t want to invite the girl to join her but she couldn’t very well tell her not to. Aubrey squinted into the sunlight and lowered herself onto the step. Then she unzipped her bag and pulled out tiny plastic containers, carefully arranging them on the step beside her. Nadia stared at tubs filled with macaroni and cheese, slices of steak, potato salad.

“That’s seriously your lunch?” she said. Of course it was. Of course Aubrey Evans’s parents cooked her elaborate feasts for her lunch, because God forbid, she should have to eat something as normal as a sandwich.

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